I understand that aspect of this issue and why their continued presence, as is, is an issue that needs to be addressed. I’m just not completely sold on simply tearing them down and telling people who object to stfu and move on. We know how martyrdom works out in people whose identity depends on a sense of victimization. I like @DukeTrout’s suggestion to put them in a museum where viewing them is optional and completely re-contextualized, e.g., placed in a “Hall of Traitors”. I wonder about the myriad precedents in cultural evolution and censorship feeding reactionary tendencies. I have observed a lot of Southerners (where, for better or worse, I grew up) flocking to the “rebel” flag as a point of identity because they don’t have any alternative point to hang place-identity or pride and they find empowerment and solidarity in giving the middle finger to Yankee/carpetbagger demands (NB: I don’t agree with this pattern or support it, I’m just saying I’ve observed it a lot). The stories we tell about the South are that it is the armpit of America, a cesspool of incest, meth, and racism, and rusted infrastructure haunted by brain drain. That mythology has real power over the people who stay and fosters an antagonistic us vs them dichotomy. There’s no obvious path forward from that and I don’t think we’ll get Southerners to embrace a better future if we condition it on them wearing a scarlet letter forever. I don’t have a solution here and I’m not advocating for a specific outcome, I’m just wondering about the various cause-effect relationships at play in this complex issue.
I’m happy with recontextualization, but we also should not pretend that these are not offensive to many southerners who also live here and were the primary victims of the slave economy and the segregation era (which is lived memory). For years, next to the zoo down here, there was the cyclorama. Every years for decades, thousands of Atlanta and north GA children (black and white) trooped through the exhibit, which had some amount of historical inaccuracies (it mainly focused on the Battle of Atlanta). A few years ago, they moved it up to the Atlanta History Center, where it can be more properly contextualized within the history of the city and the south.
Why do we need to tip toe around their hurt feelings, though? They are welcome to feel however they want about race or history, doesn’t mean they are correct and that we have to bend over backwards to make them feel like their inaccurate views of the past and of people of color are acceptable. They’re not. They have a right to live their lives, but they have no right to have their retrograde views accepted as just as correct as actual history. It’s the same problem with people who want to teach intelligent design next to evolution. One is science and one is not. Same here. One is history and one is not. The lost cause myth is just that, a myth spread to ensure the continuation of white supremacy - backed by decades of violence, too.
You’re ignoring that not all southerners are like that… especially the black ones or the ones who come from liberal or progressive/unionist families. We’re not all backwards yokels down here and the whole point of things like jim crow or the lost cause myth was not to celebrate “southern” heritage, but one particular virulently racist, sexist, homophobic, bigoted authoritarian kind of southern heritage that excludes a hell of a lot of people who are also southerners.
Like much of the rest of the country, it’s a mixed bag. There are truth in those stories, just like there is truth in the facts of our literary, cultural, food, and musical heritage which the rest of the country… the rest of the WORLD loves to embrace and celebrate. All those things you list exist in other parts of the country, too.
Education would help, as would having political structures that help people rather than take away from them.
[quote=“xhonk, post:109, topic:146158”] I don’t think we’ll get Southerners to embrace a better future if we condition it on them wearing a scarlet letter forever.
[/quote]
We work on improving their lives… and once again, “southern” is not solely defined by bigotry. That’s a huge part of the problem here, that not only do some southern whites view their history inaccurately, so does the REST OF THE COUNTRY. The fact that there exists the stereotype of the white backwoods hick that’s holding the rest of America back, the only ones who are racist or sexist, does not help. People get defensive when you paint them as a monolith, of course. But assuming that the definition of a southerner is a white kkk member is part of the problem. Many of the people advocating for removing or recontextualizing these monuments to hate ARE THEMSELVES as southern as sweet tea and collard greens! SOUTHERNERS themselves, in other words, want these changed, because they are divisive and do not represent history as it was actually lived. And lets not forget that not too few yankees and carpet baggers are fully on board with keeping these racist monuments around, because they too are on board with white supremacy (starting with our current president, and moving out to the rest of his party).
I think leaving the monuments, as they are, under the assumption that they are accurate historic monuments with no connection to jim crow and racism is deeply problematic. I’m saying this as someone who has lived in GA almost all of my life. Groups like the daughters of the confederacy need to get out of shaping history education, because they have a particular agenda that is not conducive to changing the narrative to a more historically accurate one. I’m actually fine with recontextualization, as I think that would likely stick in the craw of the racists jerks more than just getting rid of them altogether. Although, I think each community itself should be having this discussion.
I think the problem is that in this context, the statues are the scarlet letter, and the people advocating for their continued unopposed and un-recontextualized existence are (to perhaps stretch this metaphor a bit too far) the ones actively stitching scarlet letters to their clothing with verve and vigor while shouting about what a great color scarlet is and how much they love the letter A. That better future isn’t being conditioned on them being permanently branded as having done terrible things in the past, it’s just conditioned on them not celebrating the fact that they did.
I will say, I’m not totally against putting a representative sample of these things into museums where they can be surrounded by sufficient historical material to make recontextualization more effective (and certainly more effective than leaving them in place with an asterisk beside them). That said, I must confess: I worry that the effect of essentially leaving them up in a shame hall would be equal to—if not greater than—the effect of tearing them down in the minds of the devout. As someone else noted earlier, people have short memories without prominent reminders. Removing a statue might cause a spike of resentment, but over time it would fade. Putting it in a museum’s “Hall of Traitors”, though, gives the aggrieved an opportunity to constantly be reminded of what the rest of the country (and history) thinks of their pet cause.
That said, if they need to be retained so we don’t forget about their actual use and purpose as a tool of white supremacy as well, then bring on the Hall of Traitors I guess.
I don’t think that the recontextualization has to take the form of a “hall of shame”, just a reflection of the more complicated historical reality that actual exists - one where the term southerner does not mean ONLY a racist red neck KKK member. Recontextualization can mean telling the history of the civil war AND the attempt to white wash the confederacy, who did it, why, and what that meant at the time. While the people impacted by Jim Crow and slavery are still very much alive today, the people who fought for the confederacy are dead (although some of their grand children are likely still around, though old).
We’re largely in agreement on most of this. Better education, revisionist whitewashing agendas out of town squares and educational standards, not all Southerners, etc etc. Of course the South is not a monolith and nor will monolithic solutions fix such a wickedly complicated issues. This whole thing cuts to a deeper pattern that’s been on my mind: regressive tribalism as a defensive reflex against future shock, playing out in a spectrum of hierarchy vs tolerance in conservative vs liberal world-views made worse by filter bubbles with positive feedback loops for confirmation biases, which leads me to approach alteration of symbols that people hang their identities on with caution. This isn’t saying don’t act, nor is it saying we must coddle or respect regressive opinions, it’s just wondering how things will play out in different factions over time.
Honestly, if we have to drag them along to a better world kicking and screaming, I’m okay with that. Their bigotry in power means that the rest of us don’t get to live the lives that we want, and it’s no longer acceptable, frankly.
I do get what you’re saying about modernity and tribalism. But there are plenty of things that have changed over time and that have panned out for the better, even if there was conflict over the changes at the time. People are more than welcome to believe whatever they want to believe. They are not welcome to build a world where that world view takes away the rights of others.
… with the caveat that that welcome mat does NOT come with a freedom-from-consequences rider.
Absolutely. People don’t get to spout off with bigoted garbage and then act like a broflake when their ideas aren’t accepted as gospel truth… It’s discourse, not a monologue of hate.
BOOK YOUR DREAM WEDDING AT OUR WHITE SUPREMACY THEME PARK
Yep. Those places rarely even discuss slavery, and if they do, it’s quick and white washed… There have been a few recently working to correct that (maybe Whitney Plantation in LA is one of those?), but for the most part, they are portrayed as idyllic fantasies with pretty dresses and mint juleps.
[ETA] Seems to be the one I was thinking of?
After watching Sharp Objects that stuff just makes me think of horror movies
It’s not a chess game where we can foresee what will happen ten moves ahead.
You just gotta look at what has to be done and do something.
Years ago I attended an exhibition in a London art gallery of WWII and Cold War era propaganda, mainly paintings and posters, but in the darkened foyer under a spotlight was a Nazi eagle standard on a plinth. You could see the bullet holes. It was terrifying.
You’re supposed to remember the horrible, so that it doesn’t happen again, not celebrate it, nor cause a rallying point for that hateful attitude to grow anew.
I like the idea of keeping one or two of these statues in a museum, because that’s the context they should stay in, the past. Tell the stories they represent, don’t leave them in the parks and streets for people to gather around and tell their own potted histories. Vandalizing them leaves fools with anger and a reason, however wrong, to fight back. Take them down officially, leave no room to argue, and replace them with the truth.
Yes. Whitney Plantation really lives up to that Smithsonian headline. It’s a must-visit for anyone who comes to New Orleans.
I came away wishing that it should be required for every white American school kid to visit so they can see the physical evidence of the brutality of slavery and the many names of only a fraction of the “peculiar institution’s” victims (a lot of them children, too). The guides are truly wonderful and it’s a labour of love and conscience by a private individual.
Lol there is no constructive way to deal with white supremacists. When you look at the last 60 years of unmitigated neoliberalism and see how thoroughly it has failed not just here, but globally, and in the immediate aftermath of two massive wars with exactly that ideology (US Civil war and WWII), maybe you should start to think “Gee, it ain’t fucking possible, is it?”.
Happy Juneteenth to the African-American folks here at BoingBoing.
If you ask me, the Confederate statue question (stay or go?) should be left up to a committee of representative African-Americans, since the whole issue has been about them and the aggressive and willful negation of their existence as autonomous human beings since the 1600s. We white people need to step aside.
Re: defacing or pulling down monuments
Maybe the people who walk past them every day know more about what those monuments signify than you do?
In the case of monuments to the heroes and patriots of the Confederacy, the obvious effect is to say that defending slavery and the accompanying torture and terrorism can be heroic and patriotic.
Less obvious to people who don’t live in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, etc is how those statues serve as a warning. The tell you that you’d better not back-talk the cop, even if he’s staring down your top, because anything could happen to you. Or it tells you that it’s okay that “those people” didn’t get to register to vote until the mid-70s, or that “those people” live in that neighborhood (they just stopped call them n***** town and n***** lane and such in my lifetime) because they aren’t as human as you. Those statues are part of a system of oppression.
If you don’t live here, you have no idea. Really.
What do you think it does to a kid to go to a public school called Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis? I can tell you from working with them that the least pernicious effect is how cynical, disaffected, and alienated the kid is when he gets to college.
Armchair apologetics is fine, but sometimes it’s good to listen.
Grazie!
Well, surely, they’ll get it right THIS time! /s
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
